How the New Democrats Could End the Drone Wars

Leftist challengers in 2018 have an opportunity to tackle one of the most troubling legacies of the Obama years.

October 4, 2018

One spring during the Obama administration, I sat
with a group of Yemeni farmers in Sana’a. I’d contacted them after a U.S. drone flying
over the village of al-Sabool struck a bus full of shoppers, killing
twelve civilians. One of the farmers,
Abdullah, told me how he’d rushed to the scene to find his neighbors,
grievously wounded, struggling out of the wreckage. He carried survivors to
hospital.

A man reached into his pocket and pulled up a
grainy video on his phone. Together we watched the aftermath of the attack. The
shell of a Land Cruiser was aflame. A woman’s charred remains had fused to
those of her ten-year-old daughter in her lap. Her surviving son, Ahmed, told
me he’d only recognized his sister from a clump of her hair. My colleague stepped out of the room to
vomit.

Beyond the ashen bodies, one image from the farmer’s
video stayed with me: a semicircle of men, all holding glowing smartphones,
filming the wreckage.

During the Obama years, these videos became the
local equivalent of American videos of police shootings. The viral images came,
for Yemenis, to symbolize the brutality and incompetence of American drone
policy.

The target of the al-Sabool attack wasn’t in the
bus. Several further strikes apparently missed him, too.

In the past eight months, another front has opened
in the CIA’s “war on terror.” This time it’s Niger. The agency has quietly erected a drone base in
Dirkou from which to surveil and strike the Sahara, a conduit for drugs, arms,
and migrants hoping to cross the Mediterranean.

Drones remain a popular counterterrorism
tool: no risk to the pilot; no flag-draped coffins. But as I learned in years
investigating the drone wars in Yemen and Pakistan, the ripple effects, while
less visible to Americans, are real. Drones heighten locals’ suspicions of
foreign meddling and can destabilize fragile nations. And a new wave of
progressive Democrats, in 2016, has the opportunity finally to call a halt,
reversing one of the most troubling legacies of their party’s time in power.

No national security policy is more associated with President Obama than “targeted killing.” In his first year alone, the U.S. carried out more drone
strikes than took place during the entire Bush presidency. By the end of his term, the rate of strikes had increased by a factor
of ten, enjoying support from Congressional Democrats and aggressively defended in court by the Obama-era Justice Department.

All told, Obama’s drones killed thousands. The best independent estimates number the innocent
dead in the hundreds, far in excess of the 120-person tally administration
published in a nod to transparency at the end of Obama’s term.

Under President Trump, the U.S. government has stopped issuing such reports altogether. Trump has not
hesitated to expand the drone wars he inherited. This year the U.S. has conducted drone strikes in at least eight
foreign countries: Niger, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen,
Libya, Syria, and Iraq.

This year, progressive challengers have beaten established Democrats by
pressing for more left-wing policies at home. But the midterm challengers have
been markedly quieter on national security and foreign policy.

If looking for a way to burnish their credentials in this field while
distinguishing themselves from the establishment, the new progressives have a
ready-made issue in targeted killings. To win
this debate, they would need to accept that the drone wars began with Democrats.
They would need to talk with Americans about terrorism: where it comes from,
how to fight it, how much of our national oxygen it should be permitted to
consume.

The incoming generation of leftists could wean
the party from the drone.

A young boy at an anti-drone protest in Peshawar, Pakistan.A. Majeed/AFP/Getty Images

How did airborne assassinations become the key
tool in our intelligence arsenal?

An American drone first killed someone outside a
theatre of war in November 2002. But encouraged by technological advances, and
hemmed in by the president’s campaign positions against on-the-ground
entanglements, it was President Obama’s White House that truly embraced the
drone—with CIA director Leon
Panetta memorably calling drones“the only game in town.”

The legitimacy of Democrats’
drone wars was vested in Obama’s morality and judgment.

Counter-terrorism remained a top priority as Obama came into office: Only swift action by passengers stopped Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab, allegedly working with the Al Qaeda branch active in Yemen, from
bringing down an airline full of Christmas travellers over Detroit in 2009. Drones
offered a seductive promise: a cheap, limited weapon to reduce the risk of
terrorism (something Americans want) without risking American blood (something
Americans oppose). Moreover, unlike messy diplomacy or human intelligence, they
offered clear, measurable results: names crossed off lists.

Perennially at risk of looking weak on national
security, Obama protected his flank by running many more lethal counter-terror
operations than his predecessor, backed by a public-relations campaign that sold Obama’s image—to party and public—as a calculating but ruthless
warrior. “A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas,
he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions. And he
knows that bad strikes can tarnish America’s image and derail diplomacy,” ran the
New York Timesarticle revealing the existence of a kill list. However
grey the ethics of drone killing, Obama’s supporters argued, Americans should
thank themselves that a cautious president—a former constitutional law
instructor—kept the policy tightly under personal control.

But this also meant that the legitimacy of Democrats’
drone wars was vested in Obama’s morality and judgment. Few considered how the
violence might grow in the hands of the nationalist hard right.

Support for the
drone program ran deep among Democrats. Dianne Feinstein, then-chairwoman of
the Select Committee on Intelligence, staunchly supported the CIA in the drone wars even as she clashed
with them over torture. Only a handful of Senators—Rand Paul from the
libertarian right, and Ron Wyden from the left—questioned whether it was wise,
forty years after the Church Committee report, to let the CIA back into the assassination
game.

By 2016, Obama
began to voice concerns. “I don’t want our
intelligence agencies being a paramilitary organization. That’s not their
function,” Obama said in a 2016 exchange with students at the University of Chicago.

National security leaders, after retirement, also
began to cast doubt on the drone war’s effectiveness. Many felt that drones’
promise—low-risk national security on the cheap—was proving a mirage. The
weapons were not as accurate as initially hoped, and there was a problem of
perception. Stanley McChrystal, the former commanding general in Afghanistan warned in 2013 that American
drone strikes “are
hated on a visceral level, even by people who’ve never seen one or seen the
effects of one.”

The first academic study into the drone war, a 2012 collaboration
between the Stanford and New York University law schools, found drones depressed school
turnout in targeted communities, and kept terrified farmers from their work—neither
outcomes ideal for creating stability in conflict zones. They caused an
epidemic of anxiety and depression.

Although the
second Obama administration seemed more conflicted than the first about its
policies, only two bereaved families ever received
a presidential apology for a drone strike: the
relatives of the American and Italian hostages killed in a
strike on Al Qaeda in Pakistan in 2015.

For those at the sharp end of the drone wars, this double standard has
festered, fueling resentment that only helps the region’s radicals.

“I
would not be surprised if a hundred tribesmen joined the lines of al Qaeda as a
result of the latest drone mistake.”

The number of Yemenis in the local branch of Al Qaeda increased severalfold during Obama’s war. “I
would not be surprised if a hundred tribesmen joined the lines of Al Qaeda as a
result of the latest drone mistake,” one Yemeni activist told CNN after an attack in
September 2012. The
average young man in Niger or Yemen is increasingly aware that a drone pilot in
the United States can kill someone’s wife and children before driving home to his
own at the end of a shift.

And the results of that realization give the lie to one of the
fundamental assumptions of drone warfare: that there is a way of picking off
the people who threaten us without the hard work of engaging the societies from
which they come.

In President
Trump’s first year in office, strikes in Yemen and Somalia have tripled. He’s boasted
of having “totally changed [the] rules of engagement” for air war, with
predictable results: over six thousand civilian casualties in Iraq and Syria alone. In April, The
Washington Post reported the president had watched a video of the CIA
strike, only to ask why the agency had waited until the target was away from
his family.

But with the 2018 midterms, a new class of Democrats may tilt the balance of power in Congress. The leftists in their ranks have a chance to seize the opportunity Democrats missed in 2008—to reset America’s relations with the Muslim world. A foreign policy platform to match their domestic ambitions would explain that our endless, borderless war on terror has an opportunity cost: money and talent drained on a failed attempt to manage remote populations from the sky. The siren call of low-risk counter-terrorism has in fact fueled violent sentiment, and radicalized communities against American interests.

Democrats
bequeathed us the drone wars. It would be only fitting for Democrats to stop
them.

Cori Crider writes about the national security state and the social impact of new technologies. She is a lawyer and former director of the human rights organization Reprieve.